A passion for Taschen

Only at the house of Taschen would homoerotica sit side by side with horticulture, Fetish Girls next to French Impressionism. We meet the husband-and-wife team who made soft porn look mainstream and brought architecture books to the masses

Taschen. It's not just porn, you know. It's not just fantastic women in fetish spikes - tied up. It is also dogs and gnomes and Gaudi; it is Swedish interiors; it is car crashes and Tiki and the complete paintings of Van Gogh.

Sex. Art. Design. The urbane consumer now looks at a Wassily chair leg by Marcel Breuer in much the same way that he (or she) looks at a naked woman's leg by Helmut Newton. Visual and digital culture has bred the relaxed detachment of voyeurism.The Taschen catalogue reflects this. Ron Arad is as glamorous as Betty Page; a Frans Lanting parrot 'evokes luscious sensuality'; even a bat looks lewd.

Think flash. Think weird. Think houses by Neutra and lilies by Redoute. Taschen books are beautiful, original, unpredictable and - pay attention, because this is important - affordable. They have made Taschen a unique publishing house in a world where inventive notions struggle to survive in the swamp of corporate conglomeration. The founder, Benedikt Taschen, has merged the sensibility of a small imprint with sure-fire commercial ideas, while managing to remain independent, transgressive and viable. And he doesn't print cookery books. For this alone, he should be revered.

Taschen has offices in London, Madrid, New York, Paris and Tokyo, but Cologne is the place to view the man, inspect him, as it were, in his natural habitat. A German cathedral city on the Rhine, Cologne is not immediately recognisable as a place to promote fancy plans. It seems, on casual inspection, to be full of ice-cream parlours. Berlin, surely, with its psycho-sexual cabaret backdrop and tradition of cultural resistance, should be the breeding ground of the wayward. But Wolfgang Tillmans, an artist with whom Taschen has worked since 1993 and who grew up in this area, observes that Cologne is, in fact, exactly the right place for this operation.

'Berlin is more judgmental than Cologne,' he says. 'Cologne has an art-loving liberal past and it is much easier to get things done there. It is very open-minded. In the 80s, it was the centre of the West German art-scene, and was an important link to American artists. There were other artists living there, as well as collectors - rich industrialist patrons - unlike Berlin, which is surrounded by agriculture and which, until recently, did not have strong connections to western Europe.'

And so to Hohenzollernring 53. This is a grand, grey mansion with a cool, white courtyard. It is all pillars and white walls and glass and parquet floors that are screaming out for someone to tap dance on them. There is a suspended boat by the late Martin Kippenberger. There is a huge nude by Helmut Newton. There is also a staff of 75, as well as Mr and Mrs Taschen.

Mr Taschen is wearing a Brazil football shirt. He has a sad face, lugubrious even, and is a quiet person who listens and asks questions rather than expostulating revelations. 'He doesn't give away a lot,' says Tillmans. 'And he doesn't talk about his emotions.'

Nevertheless, he is patently enjoying himself. 'I always wanted to be number one in the area in which I worked,' he tells me. 'If the goal was not working, then I changed the goal.'

Mrs Taschen is Angelika - graceful, lean, a cool blonde in red kitten heels. Born in Cologne, where her parents ran a bookstore, she originally wanted to be a ballet dancer, but grew too tall. This was heart-breaking. 'I still get emotional when I read reviews of the new ballets,' she says. 'When a dream breaks it is very difficult.' She thought of going to America to have an operation to cut out a bit from her too-long legs, but her parents wouldn't let her. So she studied art history at Heidelberg instead.

'After my PhD, I did not know what to do, so I went to the Frankfurt Bookfair. I was always a passionate bookworm and I was excited to see a funny [Taschen] booth with squeaking marsupials and young, laughing people. I was young, too, 25, so I wrote a letter.'

She arrived at Taschen in 1986 in order to oversee Kolner Junggesellen (Cologne bache lors) a book that was supposed to initiate a series about single people all over the world. The book failed, but Angelika did not. She fell in love with the boss. They were married in 1996, in Cologne.

'We came from all around the world,' remembers Eric Kroll, a friend and editor. 'Taschen arrived in a horse-drawn carriage.'

Angelika has a 21-year-old daughter, Ana, by her first marriage. Benedikt has three children by his first marriage - Marlene, 15, Benedikt, 14, and Charlotte, 12. They all have dinners together in their apartment, which is walking distance from Taschen HQ.

Their relationship is obviously key to both the successful running of Taschen and to the quality of their lives. 'We talk about work the whole time,' Angelika remarks. 'It is our life.'

The Taschens share basic beliefs - that the books must be well designed and reasonably priced, and that the bad sellers don't matter so much. Car Crashes & Other Sad Stories , published last year, consisted of 195 photographs of upended corpses and crumpled bonnets taken by an unknown photographer in the 50s. It was not a hit, but, says Angelika, 'it does not matter if it is an extraordinary book and we have made some nice friends as a result of working on it'.

'We never start with a huge print run,' Benedikt adds. 'We reprint. If you don't reprint a book, it is not a success, but neither is it a big failure, so you don't have a problem.'

This attitude is one of their great strengths and is among the reasons why the company has managed to remain gleefully adventurous. Benedikt agrees that the company is subversive, but adds that 'it is not really intentional'.

Nor do they see themselves as educators; it is more to do with enjoying the fact that a lot of people like what they like. 'That is my idea of success,' says Angelika, 'when other people laugh or share the same thing as me.'

Angelika, as chief editor, is responsible for a series of books on interiors, a line she launched in 1993 and which became the company's best sellers. 'When I started,' she says, 'there were like two interiors books, but now everybody is doing it. It is always the same.When Taschen started doing art, art books were not very exciting and they were very, very expensive. Now, 10 years later, they are popular.'

She also worked on last year's book by Leni Riefenstahl, a woman who once made films to promote Hitler's cause. Shameless, as always, Taschen gave the 71-year-old a hard-cover with dust jacket, sold her as 'one remarkable woman' and a 'cult feminist figure' and stirred up a controversy that was more useful than any expensive advertising campaign.

Benedikt Taschen is an unusual man. And, like many unusual people, his creative delinquency emerged early in life. Born on Vorgebirgstrasse in the south of the city, he is the son of two GPs and the youngest of five children. 'Nobody played with me,' he notes. 'Neither parents nor siblings. Though my brother-in-law Ulli did. He was an art and music fan...'

The suicide of his brother Wolfram (at the age of 22), when Benedikt was eight, was a tragedy that shocked the family. As a teenager, he was introspective and obsessive; his thoughts fixed on comics. He liked Donald Duck and painting vampires. This is not unusual in itself - most children like comics. But Taschen had a cult aesthetic and business acumen. He quickly understood how to marry his personal interests with commercial endeavour. He collected and traded, and he still does. He was not destined to become a teacher like his older sister Hannelore. At the age of 12, he started a comic-book mail-order business; at 15, he opened a comic bookshop. It was all quite punky, except there wasn't punk in Cologne.

Taschen had difficulty surviving in the esoteric comic-book market and, in 1984, branched into art, thanks to a loan provided by his family, which funded the acquisition of 40,000 books about Magritte. The Magrittes sold and Taschen published a book by Annie Leibovitz, who was becoming one of the most famous photographers in America. Then came Dali, Picasso and the big art books.

They continued to build on their success, though there were some failures; the introduction of toys was not a success and 100,000 inflatable apes found themselves with no place to go. A record made by Benedikt, in which he sang an Edith Piaf song, might have suffered a similar fate but it was only sent out to friends.

Benedikt likes music, in particular music that he has not heard before. Eric Kroll remembers going to Amateur Nite at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. 'A young black kid got up and sang. Benedikt leapt on his chair and applauded wildly. The kid was good, but not that good. I think Benedikt went wild because it was a kid with guts...'

By 1988, Taschen was publishing in 20 languages.They had found the secret of their success - go big, go colour, go cheap and go everywhere - department store or bargain basement, the Taschen crew were never constrained by snobbery, disseminating ideas and images to a broad spectrum of people at low prices.

Buildings and breasts have made Benedikt Taschen rich. He does not buy cars (he drives an old Merc); he sometimes buys clothes - he wore an orange suit and handmade snakeskin shoes for his 40th birthday party this year - but mostly he buys art. His private collection, stored in a little gallery next to his Cologne house, is stacked high with models by Jeff Koons and pictures by the late Eric Stanton, an illustrator with a fixation for cruel mistresses. Here is the lust that is compulsive acquisition. He understands the need for colour and stimulation. It is no coincidence that Taschen books, as bright and shiny as boiled sweets, appeal to the side of human nature that wants everything in the shop.

Now Benedikt has found a lot of people to play with. He and Angelika have built up a network of artists, friends and professional allies. Benedikt prefers artists to executives or politicians. 'They have no vision,' he says of the latter. 'Nobody will care about them in 50 years' time; but we will still love and enjoy Jeff Koons' pink panther.' Their parties attract everyone from Vogue editors to artists such as Mike Kelley and Helmut Newton.

'There was a mariachi band at his 40th birthday,' says Kroll, now a San Francisco-based photographer and collector. 'Benedikt danced on the table with Angelika. We stood across the toilet bowl and chatted while peeing. It was a macho thing. Neither one of us looked down.'

Ideas arrive from a worldwide network of trusted editors, such as Kroll. 'The first time I saw Benedikt was in my studio in Manhattan,' he says. 'He'd seen a photo of mine, in black and white, of a young woman on a swing. She had on 60s-style high-heeled pumps, black vintage bra and white cotton high-waisted panties. Years later, he told me he'd decided to do my book, Fetish Girls , based solely on that image.

'He remembers things, stores them in his memory and retrieves them when he's ready. Two years after I told him about a man in San Pedro who only photographed women's feet, he asked me about him over lunch at Musso and Frank, in Hollywood. The world revolves around Benedikt Taschen time.'

Kroll found Natacha Merritt on the net, and encouraged the 22-year-old to make a book of digital photographs that she took of herself and her boyfriend having sex.

The result, Merritt's Digital Diaries , published in March last year, is what the Taschen catalogue calls a ' back-list cash-cow' - a best seller, up there with Seaside Interiors and The Garden at Eichstätt.

Sex. Art. Design. It's not just porn you know. In the mid-90s, when there was an increased awareness of contemporary art and architecture, Taschen started to publish the best visual books on these subjects, quickly scooping up Philippe Starck and Jeff Koons and showing an uncanny instinct for understanding what the gentrified radical wanted. The same talent for sensing trends came with the new reappraisal of Californian architecture. Just as rich opinion makers were buying and conserving houses by John Lautner and Richard Neutra, Taschen published the definitive book on the latter.

In 1998, Benedikt confirmed his faith as a devout Modernist by buying the Chemosphere, an extraordinary building, designed by Lautner in 1960, that looks like a spaceship floating over the Hollywood hills. The eight-sided 'pod' was described, at the time, as the 'most modern house in the world'. The Taschens tend to spend summers there - this year they will go there, with the children, to celebrate their book about Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot , which is Benedikt's favourite film.

Benedikt met the 95-year-old director after sending him a letter addressed to 'Mr Hollywood'. 'Billy Wilder said, "All right, but who would buy such a book? You will certainly make no money with it." I said, "We will surely find some people out there, from young girls to elderly gentlemen, gay, straight, and from all walks of life, whose all-time favourite cult movie is Some Like It Hot . There must be more than two billion. And if it doesn't sell, we will have great gifts to give for years to come."'

The new catalogue includes Country Houses of Sweden , but it also includes Exquisite Mayhem: The Spectacular and Erotic World of Wrestling . This is classic Taschen. Photographs of voluptuous women grappling with each other in small apartments are accompanied by an essay by Roland Barthes, which promotes its status from what is basically kitsch pervery to a legitimate subject for the thinking sensualist. The company has long known how to transform underground ideas into a glossy package that, on the face of it, looks mainstream.

The same kind of provocative insouciance surrounded their publication of Tom of Finland - bulging homoerotica of the kind that still provokes death-row throes of moralism in those places that only God and map- makers have heard of.

As Tillmans points out: 'Benedikt, as a heterosexual man, is unusual in his relaxed attitude towards homosexual erotica.'

In fact, he is relaxed about sex in general. Richard Kern, the New York-based underground film-maker and photographer, remembers selecting pictures for his book, Model Release . 'Benedikt encouraged me to include lots of sexy pictures. I tried to explain to him that I wanted the book to be an art book that dealt with elements of sex in a conceptual rather than an erotic manner. He said to me, "Richard, you must remember that this book is not a masterpiece - it's a masturbation piece."'

Tillmans also observes that Benedikt is child-like, in that 'he is easily bored and he will dream up stuff without thinking too much about the weight of the consequences'. Angelika may attempt to rein him in, but 'she doesn't necessarily always win the argument'.

Angelika's office is smaller than that of her husband, and at the back. She prefers this. It is quiet with a nice view over the courtyard. Benedikt's office is bigger and noisier, looking out over a honking street full of cafés selling quark ballchen and kirsch-kuchen . When he sits at his big glass desk his view is taken up entirely by Llona with Ass Up - a vast picture showing a naked Jeff Koons lying underneath his Italian (now ex-) wife Cicciolina, who is wearing stockings and a floral head-dress. The artist smiles with the smug satisfaction of your normal bloke who has netted a blonde porn star. She is on top. Make of that what you will but, put it this way, these two are right in front of Benedikt every single day of his working life. Herr indoors. Herr on top?

Angelika shrugs. She has appeared naked in their publicity pictures with much dignity and no apology. She doesn't think too much about the contraflow of complicated post- fem contradictions. She just knows that women are 'more beautiful, more intelligent and stronger'.

Later, when she is out of the room, I ask Benedikt if he agrees, and he says yes.